A trail of mushrooms sprouted out of the warped, weathered wood.
No one could rightly say, later, exactly when they had grown. There seemed to be so many, all at once, that someone should have noticed something—a spore, a swelling. But mushrooms had a talent for sprouting overnight, an unexpected cluster to greet you in the morning. They might last a day if there was rain, but by the following morning, one could be sure that they would collapse in upon themselves, sinking into the ground, leaving not so much as a footprint to show where they had been.
No one could rightly say their color, though most called them white and those with a little more imagination might say cream. They were neither. Up close the cups were ivory overlaid by thin threads of purple, of green, of pale gold, all muted by a fine silver dust. In the dirty dimness of the docks, their gills glowed green like the belly of a firefly—and here there was a little trouble, for sailors are already a superstitious sort, and those who frequented Myrkentown were even more wary of the strange. Anything that came up so sudden, that gave such an eerie glow, could never be a good sign.
No one would be such a fool as to taste one…but of course, someone tried. Maybe he was drunk. Maybe it was a dare. Maybe he was from out of town. He lived. That is as much as needs telling.
And eventually, someone would take the initiative to notice that while they started close to town, growing in small sporadic clusters and singletons, the further one followed, the closer and more numerous they became. Soon the path became prankish, doubling back on itself in drunken loops, running on for a ways in a quick dotted line like a trail of spilled sand. The straight row went out of its own way to make a quick circle around a barrel, then nearly vanished before it reappeared to climb one side of a post, sprout a cluster at the top, then continue down the opposite side and away, deeper and deeper into the docks.
All paths lead to somewhere.
This one led to a bent old woman, tiny and wizened, with a dowager’s hump that weighed her head so that her gaze was forced down to her shuffling feet. Grey scraggly hair hung in limp clumps upon her shoulders and obscured her face. Though she leaned on a small staff, she seemed not to make much progress; she bumbled in aimless circles, muttering “mercy!” as an apology to whatever object, living or not, she brushed against. In her other hand she held a small battered tin lamp whose patterned sides threw stars of light upon the ground before her. When her shoulder banged into a wall, the stars swayed drunkenly. She staggered past taverns, boarding houses, bawdy houses, deeper and deeper into the dockside as she followed the ghostly greenish trail.